


As if you were on fire from within

by ballade_at_thirtyfive



Category: Football RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-19
Updated: 2014-04-19
Packaged: 2018-01-20 00:17:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1489714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ballade_at_thirtyfive/pseuds/ballade_at_thirtyfive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This takes place after the Liverpool-Manchester City match and it may or may not involve drunk Xabi puking into Mikel's car.<br/>Written under the pertinacious influence of Steven Gerrard's existence. Also featuring Xabi licking a toy. Four years old Xabi licking a toy car, to make myself clear.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As if you were on fire from within

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anonlytree](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonlytree/gifts).



> For anonlytree, to continue the tradition of drunk Xabi in dimly lit places. And for everyone else who 'feels personally victimized by Steven Gerrard's existence'. 
> 
> Happy Easter Holidays!

_Sabadell, April 1987_

The air outside is heavy with rain. 

The air inside is heavy with Mikel not yet throttling Xabi.

The boys are sitting with their noses pressed to the cold window, hoping for a repetition of the 85’ flying palm tree incident.

Xabi is loudly chewing on a _miguelito_ he charmed off the old lady from two floors down.

Mikel is silently contemplating how the hell he ended up with a bottomless pit for a brother.

‘Mikel, will you go outside with me and play ball?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll give you half of this..’

Mikel looks for a second at the slobbering piece of pastry thrust in his face before wrinkling his nose and wondering if there’s any way he can make Sabrina here play dead for a day or two.

Xabi, unperturbed, stuffs the rest of the _miguelito_ in his mouth and smacks his lips just loud enough to make sure he’s annoying his older brother. He might only be four years and 5 months old but he knows exactly what buttons to push.

‘Do you want to play soldiers?’

‘No.’

Two minutes of silence in which Xabi manages to get his sticky hands all over Mikel’s Spiderman shirt he may or may not have planned to wear to Elena Artugo birthday party.

One and a half minutes of Xabi yelling after Mikel hit him in the head with a shoe quickly followed by:

‘Mikeeeeeeel, do you want to play with the cars?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll let you play with my new red one. I know you like it.’

Mikel does, in fact, like it. He had begged his mother for that particular toy for days before she caved in and bought it for them ‘to share’. Xabi started licking it not two seconds after he got his fat paws on it and promptly declared it his.

‘Pretty, pretty please, Mikel’, Xabi is now climbing on his brother like a human octopus, tugging on whatever parts of him look more vulnerable.

Mikel will go on in life to refuse many things: interviews, third league teams, second helpings at Christmas dinner, women who look too happy, but that ‘No ’ muttered on that particular day was perhaps the most final.

Xabi looks at him with big, dejected eyes but that trick failed to do an impression on Mikel around four years and 3 months ago.

Now Xabi starts hitting him with his foot and continues to do so for 3 reds on the streetlight across the road.

This finally gets a reaction out of Mikel.

He smacks his brother on the back of his head with his racket using the exact technique his tennis instructor showed him. Granted, in practice he mostly focuses on hitting the ball.

Two and a half minutes of Xabi trying to produce enough snot to warrant a reaction out of Dona Isabel if he were to cave in and run to his mother.

‘Xabi, say, do you want to go play hide and seek?’

The bundle of fat with huge eyes will go on and play a part in the biggest football comeback in the history of fucking eternity. And yet, this is probably as surprised as he’ll ever get in his entire lifetime.

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

Mikel feels a pang of something as he looks down to his beaming brother. He stores the new sensation as anticipatory remorse and continues to shepherd the gullible sack of fat towards the flat’s entrance door and then down the stairs.

‘Can I be the first one to hide?’

‘Fine’, says Mikel making an entire spectacle of looking pained which is mostly for the sake of posterity since Xabi has not grasped the concept of suspicion just yet. He guides Xabi out the building’s door with a firm push.

‘Go as fast as you can and hide really well, ok?’

Xabi nods solemnly.

‘I’ll count to one hundred and look for you.’

Xabi nods again and starts sprinting as fast as his chubby legs will let him.

Mikel slams the door with a satisfying click and climbs the stairs two at a time with a grin covering his entire face and with a comic book he managed to hide from his brother’s grabby hands in mind.

 

Three hours later the comic book is long forgotten. His mother seems to be somewhere between the usual exasperation and true, actual despair which is not a look Mikel cares to see on Dona Isabel. His father, looking more frilled than on match days, went around the neighborhood to look for Xabi.

His mother is close to tears, pacing the living room carpet and twisting her fingers, but Mikel is not really worried. There’s no way in hell he’s getting rid of his brother that easy so he has no reason to be scared. He’d like to tell that to his mother but he has a feeling it would do him more harm than good.

Periko finally arrives an hour later with Xabi in tow. Dona Isabel almost suffocates him in her embrace as she also starts yelling, asking him where he went and why and what in the world he was thinking.

Xabi looks straight at Mikel just long enough to make him want to play hide and seek by myself or question whether he really is past his peeing in his pants times. Xabi then looks at his parents and says in a small voice:

‘Mikel.. Mikel told me not to do it.’

Xabi gets grounded for the rest of his lifetime. Dona Isabel pours herself some French sherry. Periko briefly considers a vasectomy and Mikel takes back his place by the window.

Xabi climbs next to him and hands him a hot _mantecada_ from his back pocket, elucidating the mystery of his whereabouts.

Mikel bites into the pastry just as Xabi whispers: ‘You owe me’ and takes up more space than he logically should.

From that moment on, Mikel Alonso Olano knew three things. Firstly, his brother was a sociopath secondly, the real meaning of fear and thirdly, their neighbor made fucking good pastry.

 

 

Madrid, 14 April, 2014

It’s a bit past two in the morning and Mikel’s asleep in his bed, surrounded by psychology manuals and dread. Being the smartest from a bunch of guys who were hit in the head by flying footballs one too many times and whose only required means of communication was loud grunting set him up with quite delusional expectations for academic life.

His phone starts ringing and Mikel’s panicked first reaction is ‘Please, God, let it not be my thesis supervisor’.

Instead, he ends up with a disgruntled man whose muttering informs him he’s in for a great night of playing ‘Please Don’t Puke In My Car™’ with Xabi. At least the call is from a bar and not a police station so there’s that.

‘Look, _hombre,_ he told me to call you when he runs out of battery on both his phone and his tablet but it’s no emergency or anything. He’s sober enough to criticize my whisky selection so..’

‘Oh, trust me’, Mikel says as he’s leisurely browsing his wardrobe for a shirt, ‘I’m in no hurry’.

He arrives at the bar forty minutes later, giving Xabi just enough time to get smashed so he’ll not put up too much of a fight when he tries to drag him to the car.

The bartender looks at him as if he’s the second coming handing out eternity liquor licenses. He corners Mikel and starts gesticulating wildly.

‘ _Tio,_ he’s monumental, ok? Bloody hell, my wife is French, his goals in the quarters gave me two weeks of peace. Of silence. Do you have any idea how rare that is? She never shuts up. And she somehow learned Spanish. Where from, fuck knows. I didn’t teach it to her, it makes her a lot harder to ignore. But anyway, I admire him a lot. _El maestro, el professor..’_

The man looks quite demented in his tirade but Mikel can’t hold it against him, knowing first hand just how much Xabi enjoys tormenting people.

‘ _La Barba Roja, si, hostia!_ But if he tells me to ‘play it, Sam’ one.more.fucking.time I swear to God I’ll punch him so hard he’ll understand the offside rule worse than Benzema.’

Mikel smiles and makes his way to Xabi’s table, letting the poor man mutter about his brother’s interviews in which he recommends all of Madrid’s posh restaurants but God forbid he mentions the dingy bar in which he ends up more often than not. _Si_ , _claro_ , the food is not that good and the liquor selection consists of three types of vodka, but the bartender is a fucking saint, ok?

Mikel sits down next to his brother and glances at the moderate number of glasses scattered around.

‘Fuck, Xabs, how are you such a lightweight?’

‘I’m a professional athlete, you moron.’

‘Classy’, Mikel deadpans and makes a sign for the bartender. Xabi grabs his hand and starts waving with it at the bartender.

‘We’re good. Thank you.’

The bartender rolls his eyes and continues sweeping the floor.

‘The drinks here are horrendous. If you want something just tell me’ Xabi mutters as he unbuttons his jacket and shows Mikel the flask he’s carrying in his chest pocket.

Mikel rests his head on the table with a dull thud. He has four essays to write, a presentation and two days left to come up with a reasonable argument for his paper. He does not need this. And regardless of his moderate (always moderate) failure in the cruel football world, his bones still hurt in random places at weird times. So no, he definitely doesn’t need this.

‘Does Nagore know you’re here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. She woke up when I got out of bed so I told her I was thirsty and needed a drink.’

‘Fuck’s sake..’

A couple of minutes pass and Mikel finally accepts a swing out of Xabi’s flask, purposefully not wondering why in the world he owns one.

They sit there in silence as Xabi gets drunker and drunker and the bartender more and more murderous.

A few years ago he’d have been met by a drunken speech that would have shed light on why Xabi’s attempting alcohol poisoning. Now his brother has enough walls that not even Knob Creek Whisky can hope to effectively chip at them.

Xabi looks at him with hazy eyes and makes a sad sign to the bartender to bring them their check. He then rests in his chair, closing his eyes and almost folding in on himself.

‘You know what I miss?’

‘No’

‘Losing.’

Mikel supposes that this is great practice if he ever writes that damn dissertation and becomes a sport psychologist.

‘Losing?’

‘Yes. Losing.’

 ‘You do know you’re playing Bayern, right? And that you’re probably not going to win the league either so no need to fret.’

Xabi chuckles darkly and takes another swing out of the goddam flask.

‘With him. Losing with him. Fucking hell, Mikel. It was exquisite. I felt the pain everywhere, for days..’

‘That’s a bit too much information, thanks.’

Xabi starts laughing as he only can in the company of someone who knows him well enough not to ask who he’s talking about. And he doesn’t stop laughing because how the fuck doesn’t everyone know? He’s stopped being subtle ages ago. It’s so blatantly transparent it only makes it more obvious that nobody is looking his way.

‘I took out my sim card, you know. That’s why Angel there had to call you. No.. No..Don’t laugh, that’s his real name.’

Xabi almost collapses inwards in a serious case of giggles.

‘I had to because I’d have probably tried to call him. And I can’t call him. I shouldn’t.  It’s all.. It’s all his. I shouldn’t.. ’

Xabi starts laughing quite manically now, with eyes glassy and his hand clutching his chest. Mikel’s not quite sure if he’s trying to get to the flask or if he’s trying-to-rip-his-heart-out drunk.

‘We go again.. We go again.. ’

Xabi laughs to himself just enough to almost worry Mikel.

‘He must be insane. Out of his mind. Positively deranged. For fuck’s sake, Mikel, I close my eyes and I see red but I’ve never.. I’ve always planned ahead for every damn contingency. I could counter every blow because I saw them coming from fucking miles away. I would get over it so fast because in my head it had already happened a dozen times..’

‘And now, now I worry so fucking much I can’t even walk straight.’

‘That might be the whiskey, Xabs.’

Xabi sighs defeated and gets malleable enough to be dragged to the car.

The journey home is quiet save for the instance in which Mikel mentions the Emidio Tucci add and Xabi tries to get out of the moving car.

Mikel is of course not surprised that once the destination reached and the velocity zero, Xabi refuses to leave, choosing instead to mess with the radio stations.

‘Mikel?’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m hungry.’

‘It’s four in the morning. There’s nothing open except McDonalds.’

Xabi wrinkles his nose. Mikel does not strangle him with the seat belt.

‘I want paella.’

‘Xabi, they’ll never find your body.’

‘Fine.’

‘Fine, what?’

‘Let’s go to McDonalds.’

The drive is quick. Mikel orders for both of them as Xabi’s busy trying to hide himself under a hat he found in the backseat and covering most of his face with his jacket.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘I think I saw a photographer.’

‘Calm down, Paris Hilton! An hour ago you were drinking yourself under the table in a place that doesn’t even have wifi.’

Xabi’s only response is stuffing his face with French fries.

‘I bought a ticket, you know.’

‘Huh?’

‘I’ll go.. just in case it slips. He might need.. I don’t know. I’ll just go.’

‘So you’re wishing they lose it?’ Mikel amusement collides painfully with Xabi’s fist. Which results in a car fight between two thirty year olds.

‘Bloody fuck, Xabi, bleed on your own damn jacket.’

‘That’s..not blood. It’s bloody ketchup.’

Obviously, Xabi keeps his eloquence even as he’s trying to claw Mikel’s eyes out.

Things calm down after a while. They’re not 25 anymore.

‘I might go even if they do win.’

‘Of course you might.’

‘Shut up. I won’t call him or anything. I just.. I want to be in the same country at least, when it happens.’

Mikel chooses not to comment on his brother’s ability to stir shit up. Xabi shakes his head and chuckles.

‘I see every fucking scenario. I do. But now? Now, I can’t see anything but him. I can’t even imagine.. And I know I don’t deserve to but I have three children, I don’t have time to.. to reign myself in. I don’t have time to sleep and all I fucking dream is red.’

Xabi knocks his head on the window looking pained. Mikel wonders if it’s worth cleaning the car if Xabi pukes in it or if he should just make him buy a new one.

‘I want him to win.’

‘You want him.’

Xabi smiles tiredly and doesn’t even consider denying it.

‘I want him. And I want him to win. And I want to celebrate with him when he does and fucking crawl over him when he doesn’t.’

Mikel doesn’t really feel like complaining for too much information when he sees Xabi’s face.

‘And I don’t deserve any of it.’

Xabi rests his head on the window with a thud reverting with such finality Mikel is genuinely surprised when Xabi starts talking again.

‘Did you ever sleep with Nagore?’

A moderate to long silence.

‘No. Why do you ask?’

Xabi shrugs.

‘You’re closer in age, it’s small town..’

Mikel glances at Xabi and puts his head on the driving wheel, resigned.

‘Xabi, you’re still drunk, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re going to puke, aren’t you?’

‘I’m sorry.’

 

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from Pablo Neruda's 'Ode To A Naked Beauty' because I am obviously just as much a masochist as Xabi. 
> 
> This was also greatly aided by Xabi's drunken celebrations everywhere, ever but more recently after winning the Copa del Rey.  
> Also, you probably know exactly what Xabi was watching until his batteries died, you have tumblrs and we're all masochists here, but if not [here](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P42bQ37FKqs)
> 
> Oh, and Mikel used to call Xabi Sabrina due to obvious reasons. '' Mikel jokingly remembered his younger brother as a “freckled and bad-tempered” kid, who as a child “was fat. He had boobs and a beer belly, and I think we even called him Sabrina. He was a good companion for mischief, a specialist in making mischief and getting away with it.” ''
> 
>  
> 
> [More of that here.](http://conlaroja.wordpress.com/2010/12/27/zorionak-xabi/)


End file.
